Before I dive too deeply into the income report, if this is your first time on my website let me explain why I write a detailed income report each month that outlines the money I made (or lost) each month.

I’m doing this for a number of reasons:

1) I strive to be transparent about what it takes to make money online.

2) These reports help me keep track of my own progress.

3) These reports hold me accountable.

In short, I don’t create these to gloat about my earnings. I create them to help you understand the true “earning curve” of online business. Now that we got that out of the way, let’s dive into the report.

This Month’s Income Outliers

Every month I have income that streams in from multiple sources and quite frankly, a lot of that is pretty regular. However, each month I tend to see a few line items that are drastically different from the prior month. In this section, I only discuss the items that have increased or decreased significantly.

There were two items that jumped out to me this month:

• Website 4 FBA Merchandise Sales: The only real outlier that I saw for income in December was my FB a merchandise sales.  To be honest, I was very surprised at how well the merchandise is doing and intend on adding more to it in 2019.  The problem with this merchandise is that it’s very seasonal and usually only sells around the holidays. I’m going to try to make a product or two that can sell year-round so that these dips don’t happen, but it was nice to make an extra thousand dollars this month considering income usually drops.
• Website 5 Income: Website 5 continues to grow and for the month of December it was able to increase earnings by 20%. This is mostly due to Google AdSense, but I’m still trying to rank affiliate review content unsuccessfully. I’m slowly dripping out there to see what else I can do, but I’m very hopeful that in time I’ll be able to rank review content for this website and this will result in significant increases in income.

This Month’s Expense Outliers

Similar to the income I make every month, there are certain expenses that I consider “fixed”.  As I did in the income area, I’m only going to discuss the outliers or new items added as expenses.

There was one item that jumped out to me this month:

• Incorp Services: I’d say that the only real surprise I had this month from expenses is the corporate fees I have to pay to this company. Every year I have to have a registered agent and that’s what this fee is for.

So last month I discussed how bad I screwed up on this website by accidentally implementing a no index, no follow tag across the entire website.

I’m happy to report that the website has definitely bounced back from that and though it’s not at its previous levels, it seems like things are looking up.

As of now all I continue to do with this website is try to get more back links and I have a writer creating two blog posts per week. It’s pretty much on autopilot at this point and I hope that my efforts for back linking will get the website more traffic in the future.

I found a way to have backlinking through guest posts, as well as general backlinking to the homepage. I’ve outsourced the projects as much as possible and now I’m just managing the processes.

Here’s a graph of the last 12 months of progress.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• There was a small dip in referring domains for the month and I’m not really sure why that is. I actually saw this across most of my websites so I think there was some type of correction that Google implemented.
• Earnings increased from the prior month which was very welcome news. I’m hoping that January will be better than December and considering the nature of this website, I’d be willing to bet that will be true.

Website 4 Update:

The only notable news for this website is the fact that I was able to sell merchandise to my audience and made over $1000 this month doing so. In total, the merchandise cost around $1500 to create and now I’ve made a total of $1800, so I’m already in the green and have a lot of inventory left.  If the rest of the inventory sells through, I’ll probably make another $1800 or so. 

Not too bad for a small product that I put very little effort into. Next year and going to make sure that outsource the design of the product to make it even easier on myself.

I’m pretty confident that the only way to really grow income for this website moving forward is to sell physical products. That isn’t very easy to do only because I have to find people who can create the products and then send them all into Amazon to get listed.

But moving forward, I think this is the main strategy for this website because I don’t have too much else I can write about.

In terms of the search engine “monopoly” I referred to last month with this product, it’s still in place. As of right now if you search this product in Amazon, I’m the number one result. If you search on Google, I’m the number one product result (information pulled from Amazon.com listing) and I also have the number one organic result to my own website. This is definitely the sweet spot and as long as nothing changes, I shouldn’t have a problem selling through these items.

Here are my statistics for this website in the last 12 months:

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• This was far and away my best month and the merchandise I have continues to sell. It is a product that is seasonal and won’t be selling throughout the whole year, but hopefully I’ll be able to sell all of my units by the end of March.

Website 5 Update: 

Another month has passed and Website 5 continues its steady growth trajectory. This was a difficult site as it went really far up in the beginning and then fell significantly, but now it’s starting to steadily climb month after month.

The problem though is that I created a database for this website and right now it’s almost as if Google sees me as the resource only for information related to that database and not anything else.

This is why none of the review posts are ranking. In fact, most of my blog posts also aren’t ranking and though I think that they are on par or better than my competitors, it just isn’t happening yet.

I still think it could happen and I may have to build a few links directly to the pages of my reviews, but hopefully I can make this a reality in 2019.

If I do, I already have plans on how I’m going to create multiple Amazon FBA products and sell them by using my own website as the main source.

The thing though is that I have to get a few “search engine monopolies” on some products in order to do this. I already created a review post for one product that I could easily create which has tremendous potential, but that post is nowhere to be found in Google.  I’m working to change that, but I’m not sure how it’s going to work out yet.

Here are my statistics for this website so far:

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Consistent growth is occurring. Granted, it’s not necessarily hockey-stick growth, but the slow and steady rise of traffic to this website is very encouraging.
• This was my highest earning month yet for the website. I think this will continue and am hopeful I can reach $1000 a month in the next 3 to 4 months.

Lessons Learned

Every month, I’m going to reflect back and tell you a few different lessons that I’ve learned. My hope is that the lessons each month will be a cautionary tale for you that makes it so that you don’t make the dumb mistakes that I do along the way.

• You Will Get Competition: It’s not that I’ve been ignoring my competition for Website 1, but most of them paled in comparison to what I had developed. My new competition is definitely a worthy adversary and I’m going to have to work hard to make sure they don’t overtake me.
• Guest Posting Can be Outsourced: It took me quite a bit of time to figure out how to do this, but I’ve got a nice way of prospecting, pitching, and guest posting without much effort at all on my end. I considered this to be one of the harder tasks to outsource, and I can’t wait to roll it out across all of my websites in the coming year.
• Search Engine Monopolies are Incredibly Lucrative: I didn’t know how my merchandise would sell for Website 4 in December, but I did know that I did everything I can to set myself up for success. That said, the fact that I’m number one in Google and Amazon has proven to be very lucrative even with a product like the one I have which is very small and not that difficult to create. I intend on doing this more in the future and if I can, it’s possible that each product could mean an extra $1000 a month or more in my pocket. There’s some crazy money out there in physical products, and I really want to get a piece of it.

Did I Meet my Goals for December?

Publish CK Reviews (SUCCESS)

I was able to publish one new review post on Website 5 and also published one on Website 4.  I originally intended to do both on Website 5, but when one doesn’t rank it really stops me from posting another as I don’t want to waste my time and effort. I’m going to work hard to try to rank the CK review posts which will hopefully get me more eyeballs to the pages, which will mean more income.

Goal Setting for 2019 (SUCCESS)

As you see in the report, I had no problem setting goals for 2019. Last year I went with some pretty lofty and unrealistic goals but this year I want to dial it back and focus on attainable goals.

Relax and Work on the House (SUCCESS)

I would say I did a better job of relaxing in the month of December as opposed to working on the house. Sure, I did get some small projects done but there’s still a lot to do.

What Are my Goals for January?

Fix CK Opt-in For Email List

The email opt-in on Website 5 needs to be better than what I currently have so I’ve decided to revise it to make it more effective. Email lists are so incredibly important and the only way I think I’ll ever make a lot of money with this website is by having a good one.

Revise Website 4 Review Posts For no Dead Links

The issue with review posts is that eventually products listed become outdated. Either someone stops producing them or Amazon doesn’t rank them anymore, but sometimes the stock runs out and the product listing page goes away. When that happens, you need to replace it with a new product and Website 4 needs a lot of these revisions.

Revise Website 1

Website 1 needs some revisions to keep up with the competition and I intend on completing those revisions in January. I know exactly what I need to do and I already have my developer ready to do it, I just have to make the work requirements and assign it.

Launch PI Officially

My developer is finishing up a project on my new website to get it where I need and then I’m going to officially launch this one. The nice thing about this website is I already have about 30 articles ready to go that are ready to be published, but I just need to get some development work completed first. I’m not sure exactly how much traffic this website will bring in the short term, but I know long-term and has a lot of potential.

What are your goals for the month?  What questions do you have?  Let me know in the comments below!